Peru's upper Amazon or selva alta - the transition zone between the mountainous Andes and the lowland Amazon - has been a 'hot spot' of deforestation in recent decades. In many areas, forest clearing is driven by farmers from the Andes who migrate downslope in search of cheaper and more plentiful land. These new migrants open up new frontiers - areas where agriculture and human settlement are expanding into previously unclaimed lands.

My research, with my supervisor Dr. Oliver Coomes, focuses on the dynamics of land acquisition and land use that operate as farmers arrive in a new frontier area. I am working to understand how these dynamics change through time as the frontier develops. My methods consist primarily of semi-structured interviews with small-scale agriculturalists - primarily coffee farmers - as well as discussions with NGOs and government officials. Using data from fieldwork in three different parts of the San Martin region of Peru, I have been able to compare a cross-section of frontier landscapes that have been settled for a range of different times - from an area where the first settlers arrived in the mid-1970s to one that has been inhabited year-round for only the last decade or so. ﻿

How do land markets arise and develop in a new settlement area?

Land markets play an important role in structuring the incentives that people face as they move to the frontier. In areas where prices are increasing rapidly, the risk of land speculation (or land trafficking) rises as some individuals see a financial opportunity in claiming land - or buying a large tract cheaply - for the purpose of resale. Additionally, once prices have increased, the increased financial investment that households have needed to make in order to secure their land may make it more difficult to encourage those households to engage in less intensive use of their land - for example by sparing some primary forest rather than clearing it all.

Through the interviews I have completed in San Martin, I have put together a dataset of hundreds of land claim events, land inheritances, and land sales stretching from the mid 1970s until 2013. This provides an opportunity to examine how land markets have changed through time in various districts of San Martin and to compare these changes between districts - each of which has its own particular history.